Paramasivan Fathima Movie Review: Not all spirits are worth summoning
Paramasivan Fathima Movie
Synopsis
Two feuding villages, one Hindu and one Christian, face a series of murders that lead to the revelation of spirits seeking justice for past religious conflicts.
Paramasivan Fathima Movie Review:
Written By:
Abhinav Subramanian
Just when you thought Kollywood had exhausted its quota of caste-and-religion films, along comes Paramasivan Fathima to prove there's always room for one more. Set in feuding villages of Subramaniapuram (Hindu) and Yokopuram (Christian), the film opens with wedding night murders that have both communities pointing fingers. Director Esakki Karvannan (who also plays the police lead) handles religious themes with heavy-handed obviousness, reducing believers to caricatures who might as well be living in medieval times rather than modern Dindigul.The first half establishes the murders with attempted comic sequences that fall flat. A man is lured to his death by following a singer he's attracted to into the forest - hardly the stuff of suspense. The police investigation aims for laughs that never land, making the whole enterprise feel tonally confused.The inevitable flashback reveals childhood sweethearts Paramasivan (Vimal) and Fathima ( Chaya Devi ) separated by religious conversion, Fathima's father's death and his dying wish to be buried as a Hindu, and the resulting burial ground disputes. Both Paramasivan and Fathima are murdered, and their grievances manifest as vengeful spirits. The film drags you through 140 minutes of village squabbling only to resolve everything with supernatural intervention - it's like watching grown adults argue over whose imaginary friend is stronger.Vemal and Chaya Devi do what they can with roles that require them to be both earthly teachers and ethereal avengers. MS Bhaskar's Father character is a collection of tired pastor clichés. The visuals are serviceable, though the sound design assaults you with unnecessary volume.Paramasivan Fathima is the kind of film that thinks adding ghosts to rural conflicts automatically makes them interesting. It doesn't.
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From the India Today archives (2011)
(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated June 20, 2011)"As I begin to paint, hold the sky in your hands; as the stretch of my canvas is unknown to me."—M.F. Husain With the death of Maqbool Fida Husain in a London hospital on the morning of June 9, India has not only lost her most iconic contemporary artist but also perhaps one of the last living symbols of the very idea of her modern, secular and multicultural nationalism. Born in 1915 at the temple town of Pandharpur in Maharashtra, Husain came from a lower middle class Sulemani Muslim family and rose through the ranks to become India's most famous painter of people, places and a visual artist-especially a mid-20th century modernist painter-Husain was precariously perched on the crest of a nascent and evolving national consciousness. In the post-Partition era, when he first burst on the Indian art scene, Husain became a much celebrated symbol patronised by the Nehruvian state looking to create modernist role models. Yet, that very celebrity made him and his works vulnerable to be hijacked, misrepresented and reviled three decades later by a semi-literate cabal claiming to represent the collective voice of a largely silent Hindu majority. In fact, the torrid love affair between Husain and 'modern secular' India and their eventual dismaying disengagement makes for a civilisational sociologist Veena Das remarks, this "impossible love" had an inherent fragility because the idol, the image and the word are all strongly contested entities. It is also further complicated by the illicit intimacy between history and the 'perception of history' in post-colonial imaginations. The tantalising and tragic relationship-between a nation's notion of the self and Husain's visualisation of it in his art practice-became the vexed terrain over which competing political alignments fought their proxy wars for a good two decades before it eventually led to Husain's self-imposed exile from India in 2006. Four years later, he accepted Qatari nationality, spending his time between Dubai, London and Husain was educated in the streets of Indore, a madrassa in Baroda, the Indore School of Arts and very briefly the J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai. He was an immensely talented and intelligent man with an enormous curiosity about the world who learnt effortlessly from life and people. He arrived in what was then Bombay in the early 1930s, penniless but bursting with enthusiasm and energy, traits that he retained all through his first started out by walking the streets of Bombay offering to paint portraits of people who could afford to pay him Rs 25. There were not too many commissions but some of these early portraits still survive. In 2008 in London, I saw a portrait Husain had done of Lord Ghulam Noon's elder brother in a Bhendi Bazaar sweet shop. Soon, he moved to painting cinema hoardings, first for V. Shantaram's Prabhat Studios and later for New perched high on bamboo scaffolding, Husain learnt to be able to concentrate amid the noise and chaos of the street below. He used to paint 40 foot hoardings for four annas a foot under the blazing sun in Mumbai for many years. From painting hoardings, he progressed to designing toys and painting children's furniture for Rs 300 a month. "But even at that time I knew I would be an artist one day," he used to say, adding, "there was a time when I painted furniture by day and my own art by night. I painted non-stop." Cinema held a life-long fascination for Husain and decades later, he went on to make several much-talked about films. 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